Vertical Leap

Bradley Airport Reaches For The Sky With Its Expanded Terminal -- But Is It Soaring Or Just Tall?

April 27, 2003|By PHILIP LANGDON

After decades of dullness, the folks who run Bradley International Airport have decided to go for the ``wow'' factor. No, make that a half-wow. The 62-year-old airport at Windsor Locks is run, after all, by the state Department of Transportation, and no one has ever accused transportation engineers of being a wildly creative bunch.

What have our usually non-esthetically-minded transportation specialists done? Well, they've resolved to rescue the traveling public from the drab, low-ceilinged corridors of Terminals A and B and vault Bradley into the ranks of the nation's ``serious'' airports.

Terminal A's $90 million addition, which is opening over a period of weeks, reaches for the sky -- an effect that Americans have come to appreciate since the late 1950s, when Eero Saarinen designed the nation's two most dramatic airport structures, John F. Kennedy International Airport's swooping TWA Terminal and northern Virginia's upward-curving Dulles Airport.

For the Hartford-Springfield region's passengers (6.5 million last year) accustomed to trudging through Bradley's confining and often confusing corridors, the expansion will come as a great relief. Travelers will have clear, attractive routes to six major airlines clustered at 23 gates once Terminal A's prosaic 17-year-old section is upgraded and integrated into the new structure. Twelve of the gates occupy the new east concourse. The other 11 will be in the existing Terminal A concourse, now undergoing renovation and expansion. Only a couple of carriers, American Airlines and Air Canada, will remain in the more distant Terminal B.

The big architectural gesture at the heart of the $200 million project involves height. Overlooking the tarmac from a new restaurant and retail concourse anchored by McDonald's, Brooks Brothers and a deluxe CNBC newsstand is a tilted 35-foot-high wall of glass. At the terminal's entrance, the ceiling rises 50 feet, meeting a sloping glass facade that extends all the way down to the lower-level baggage claim area. Suspended above the ticket purchasers' heads will be a large sculpture by artist Leila Daw.

There's a difference, though, between a building that soars and one that, to borrow a line from an old blues song, is ``just tall, that's all.'' The ceiling above the food concourse is high and elaborate -- composed of panels installed at three different angles -- yet it lacks the powerful sense of upward lift that Saarinen achieved with his flowing, continuously curving roofs. The east gates' concourse has a ceiling that rises in a series of long arcs -- a mildly interesting effect -- but the gate areas themselves look generic and uninspired.

There are three principal activities in airports -- standing, sitting and waiting. Bradley doesn't handle these very skillfully. What's missing from much of expansion overseen by HNTB Architects, Engineers and Planners is attention to the small scale -- the kinds of features and details that make a terminal gratifying to people who have already taken in the big effects. You can pay $1.69 a cup (small size) at the new cafe that sells LaVazza (billed as ``Italy's favourite coffee''), but you'll search in vain for a flat surface on which to set your drink in the departure lounges. Bradley's administrators ignored the fact that people frequently eat and drink while waiting for their planes, especially now that most airlines have sharply reduced in-flight meal service.

Nine upholstered chairs and four purple sofas have been shoved like an afterthought into the east end of the food concourse, where they're utterly dwarfed by a three-story wall of glass. No one can sit really comfortably in such giant-size surroundings.

In the premier issue of a journal called The Next American City, just published, Yale architecture professor Kent Bloomer argues that what's missing from too much of America's recent surroundings is ornament -- the kind of decoration that completes a setting and makes it appealingly human. Granted, the expanded Bradley has a welcome roominess. The circulation has improved and become more understandable. Big expanses deliver brightness and views. But Bradley is still not all that great a place for the inevitable standing, sitting and waiting. It lacks the fineness and human-scale detail that Bloomer considers essential.

Some of the airport's flaws may reflect carelessness or haste. A muted photographic tableau that's meant to convey the allure of New England decorates 70 feet of a corridor leading to the new gates, but sections of its scenes are covered up by poorly positioned illuminated advertising signs. A man paddling a canoe has had his head and shoulders lopped off by an ad for a printing company.